What Is Wrong With the Newspapers?

Why the Public Are Beginning to Hold Inquests on Them

WALTER LIPPMANN

The Editor: When you have done something about the gutter press it will be time enough to fret about decent newspapers. Go after sensationalism, appeals to the mob, smut, peeping Tom, the indiscreet countesses of the Sunday supplements, and all the rest of that rubbish which makes a man wonder, about universal literacy and a free press.

The Critic: Worry about the forts of folly when the attackers are demoralized ?

The Editor: Are harassed by constant faultfinding. That's no way to improve matters. The respectable press ought to be supported. Nothing should be done to undermine its authority.

The Critic: Is it being undermined?

The Editor: I have to do no end of explaining and apologizing, especially to a lot of people who know nothing about newspapers. It seems to be the fashion to hold inquests.

The Critic: And is that because a few cranks publish what they call exposures ?

The Editor: Why do you think it is?

The Critic: Because people have read the newspapers more closely than ever before. Because what the newspapers printed has mattered more than ever before. For the first time, the most important things were wholly out of sight, and the printed word, was all there was to go by.

The Editor: It is necessary to make allowances. The censorship, military necessity, government control of news, morale. You cannot blab everything to the enemy.

The Critic: I grant you all that. I'm even willing to grant you that in war you can't always trust your own people with news that is a commonplace to every one in the enemy countries.

The Editor: You have to avoid enemy propaganda.

The Critic: And make a propaganda of your own.

The Editor: I prefer to describe it as educational work.

The Critic: And when do you think the time comes to stop this educational work, and to return to the reporting of news?

The Editor: The armistice didn't settle everything. Nobody knew what Germany would do, and there was Bolshevism everywhere.

The Critic: So I read in your newspaper.

The,Editor: You didn't believe it?

The Critic: I should say not. I have reservations about the men who govern us. But two years of Mitchell Palmer and Thaddeus Sweet aren't enough to make the wrack and ruin that Lenin and his friends need before they can win.

The Editor: What's that?

The Critic: Where you have gone absolutely off the track is in thinking that Bolsheviks can wreck a government. You flatter them. The government has to be a wreck before the Bolsheviks come along. Show me a government that is a going concern, no matter how badly, how stupidly, how unjustly, and I'll show you a place where the Bolsheviks are still engaged in learning the communist manifesto by heart. Lenin is a fool for expecting the revolution in America, and you were a bigger fool for believing him.

The Editor: I always suspected that you had a sneaking preference for the Bolsheviks.

The Critic: There you are. Is it surprising that Lenin is still expecting the revolution in the United States, if he reads your newspapers and believes them? In the last two years somebody who is respectable has announced that all of the following were Bolsheviks: President Wilson and most of his administration—the authority for that is Senator Lodge, who is a scholar and a gentleman; the Republican Senators who voted against the Treaty— see the Democratic editorials during the campaign. All labor unions are soviets, according to any employer who has a quarrel with them. The schools, we have been told again and again, are full of Bolshevism. The colleges, we are told, are riddled with it. The churches, we learn, reek with it. All the farmers of the Northwest are Bolsheviks. All the Irish are Bolsheviks. All the Jews are Bolsheviks. The Catholic Church is Bolshevik. The Interchurch was Bolshevik. The Blue Sunday reformers are Bolshevik. The women suffragists are Bolshevik. For two years America's motto has been: "Everybody's a Bolshevik but thee and me, my friend, and thee's a little queer." No wonder Lenin is always asking why the revolution doesn't take place, when according to the press, almost everybody is for it.

The Editor: You're not serious.

The Critic: You've been nothing but serious. Have you read the diaries of Colonel Repington? You have. So have a lot of other people. You will remember that during the war he is constantly marveling at how little the public knows.

The Editor: Yes, and that Northcliffe and he had the courage and the foresight to expose the shell shortage.

The Critic: But not the secret treaty shortage, or the Irish policy shortage, or the indemnity shortage, or the Russian intervention shortage. And perhaps you have noted that these indiscreet diaries are either one fast calculated discretion even to-day, or that Colonel Repington, located at the very center of journalism, knew less than he imagined. Have you read Philip Gibbs's book? Was there ever a more annoying title to a book than Now It Can Be Told?

The Editor: Stop nagging. What of it?

The Critic: This. You asked why the public was holding inquests on the newspapers. I answer that it was not because of the complaining critics, but because of the leakage of truth. I am not blaming you now for anything. You had to suppress, you had to idealize, you could not freely report. You were mobilized. But you must not be surprised at the comeback. You told your readers that. Lenin would speedily collapse. He has survived every ministry in Europe. You told your readers that while he was collapsing he would conquer the world. He was defeated by the Poles. You told your readers that Kolchak, Denikin, Judenitch, and Wrangel were the Real Russia, and led them to expect a triumphant march on Moscow. In every case, the rear cracked before the front. As you well know, you have made a mess of the Russian news. Now come nearer home. Last winter and the summer beforeTast you were talking as if there were going to be a revolution in the United States. All I can say is that if you believed it, your information was defective, and if you didn't believe it, but thought it good policy to pretend .... well, I will not say what I think. But I will say that the people who were unnecessarily frightened by that nonsense, and the people who were not frightened and were therefore called Bolsheviks because they did not believe there was the minutest chance of Bolshevism in the United States, are to-day intensely suspicious of the respectable press.

The Editor: Now listen to me. Editing a newspaper is not scientific research. Truth is a difficult thing to obtain. We do the best we can, but of course we cannot overcome the limitations of human nature. All this talk about a capitalistic plot ....

The Critic: Did I say anything about a capitalistic plot? I don't believe in plots. If you will pardon me for saying so, it's the newspapers, more than, any one else, who have taught their readers to think that civilization is run by plots. It is one of the^ways of creating what you call human interest.

The Editor: The limitations of the press are the limitations of human nature.

The Critic: Do you mean that human nature culminates in you?

The Editor: What do you mean?

The Critic: I mean that, from the beginning of time, every man has answered his critics by an appeal to human nature. The old Adam. Original sin. The woman tempted me. You don't preach that to others. You tell the government that it is inefficient. Do you take the inefficiency of human nature as an answer? You tell your readers to be thrifty. Will you take for an answer the undoubted fact that large numbers of people are spendthrift? You tell motorists to be careful. Are they allowed to reply that human nature is reckless? You tell working men to work hard and be content. Have you nothing moreto say when they tell you that human nature is restless under boredom? Human nature, indeed ! It was human nature that built Louvain and human nature that burned it. There is a human nature that drives men and women to fight typhus and famine, and there is a human nature which blockades the helpless. What are literature and history but a record of an infinite variety in human nature? What are schools, colleges, churches for, if not to select and to reinforce in that variety ?

The Editor: Well, what do you want? I'm a busy man.

The Critic: I want nothing at all that you can gulp down like a pill and forget. Human nature ....

The Editor: Splendid!

The Critic: Yes, human nature is at the bottom of this thing.

The Editor: Not the capitalistic system? Not the advertisers? Not the pressure of the influential people?

The Critic: No, not at the bottom of it. The people who are telling you that are letting you down too easily. They are assuming what you like to assume about yourself: that your failures are beyond your control. You put them on the immutable character of human nature. They put them on vast economic forces. I put them on you.

(Continued on page 96)

(Continued from page 36)

The Editor: Me?

The Critic: On the profession of the journalists. I can understand why a little shopkeeper should feel that he is an incident in the march of inscrutable forces. But not teachers, not ministers, above all, not journalists, not if they once begin to understand their power. They talk a lot about the power of the press, but what kind of a power is it that still regards political news as a favor handed down by statesmen, that trembles—you know it's true—at the advertisers, that worships a whole herd of sacred cows? It's a power that is not yet conscious of itself, it is a power that inwardly acknowledges inferiority, it is a power spellbound by traditionsfrom an age when information was privileged, a power that has not yet opened its eyes upon the modern world and dared to say: Through me democracy exists. I am the medium by which the consent of the governed is given. From me and through me the will of the people is formed. . . .

The Editor: Say it, and then go bankrupt.

The Critic: Say it alone and you may go bankrupt, though I'll promise you a good run for your money. But say it, not as individuals, but as a profession, and there is no power that can break you.

The Reader (breaking into the discussion) : I agree with your indictment, but I'm against another trade union conspiracy against the patient and longsuffering public.

The Critic: May I say just one word for your, the reader's, benefit? Judging by your behavior in the matter of prohibition, I prophesy that you will perform as follows: You will grow wearier and wearier of unreliable news. You will complain about it more and more. You will do little or nothing to encourage reform from within, little or nothing to provide an educational system that produces enough competent journalists, little or nothing to make independent journalism possible. Then some fine day your patience will wear out, and you'll vote the Fifty-Fourth Amendment forbidding newspapers to contain intoxicating matter above 1 per cent. Then your constructive fervour will be exhausted.

The Editor: Well, at any rate, I agree with you entirely about the public. I serve it and I know it.